Webmasters around the world are claiming that Big Daddy has not been pulling his weight.

Big Daddy was the name Google gave to the latest release of its search engine algorithm.

Billed as the answer to eliminating the increasing a mount of spam sites appearing in Google search results, it has caused carnage in the legitimate search-marketing world.

We are slowly winning the war on junk e-mail, but the spammers have moved their skills to the search engines. A recent report suggested that at least one page in five indexed by Google is junk.

Big Daddy seems to have culled much of them, but has also sent thousands of legitimate sites to the Internet wasteland of secondary page rankings or, worse still, removed them completely.

Only last year Google was involved in a willy-waving competition with Yahoo! over who had the largest index - now it seems size doesn't matter and it's quality that counts.

If you're a Google user, thanks to Big Daddy, the web has become a much smaller place. Google say the reindexing is taking longer than expected and their server farms are under extreme pressure to re-index the entire web Big Daddy's way.

However, many webmasters are reporting that Big Daddy has been to visit their sites but has not included them in the new index.

Meanwhile, in a search galaxy far away, the evil empire Microsoft has been busy revamping its search engine - MSN. Bill Gates vowed to "keep Google honest" at the launch last week of MSN's new pay-per-click ( PPC) service called 'adCenter'.

MSN used to use the Overture PPC system, but has been frantically developing their own since rival Yahoo! bought Overture.

Regular readers will know I'm not a cynical man, but poor or missing organic (free) rankings in Google might drive e-marketeers to pay for appearances on results pages using Google's adWords.

Despite pioneering PPC advertising and making Google founders Brin and Page multi-billionaires, adWords has slowly been falling out of favour. Allegations of click fraud and rising prices have started to make webmasters covet organic ranking more.

Bill obviously thinks the time is right for Microsoft to mount a challenge on Google's search engine throne as it announced last week it would be spending $2 billion more than initially budgeted to take on web rivals.

Traffic to the MSN search site has allegedly increased by 70 per cent in the last three months - perhaps gaining fallout traffic from the Big Daddy update.

Those looking for better results from their paid-for search marketing budgets might find the new MSN service effective, although it will not be rolled to msn.co.uk until the end of June.

Big Daddy has so far been a big belly flop for Google, and only Microsoft looks to profit from it.